Moving In and Getting Settled

In my last post, we had just arrived in Ashburn on Monday afternoon and accepted the keys to our house from the realtor. Then we went and met our good friends Corey & Vince and their kids for dinner before checking into a hotel for the night.

Tuesday we got up early to head over to the house and wait for the movers to show up with all our shhhtuff. The Personal Property Office requires you to be at your house from 0800 to 1700 and threatens you with all sorts of bodily harm and heavy financial consequences if you aren’t there when the movers show up.

Of course, the movers were coming from Woodbridge, VA. According to Google Maps, that’s a 45 mile drive ("57 minutes" by Google without traffic), and they’re trying to drive through the DC area during the morning rush hour.

So we were not in the least bit surprised that the movers didn’t actually arrive at our house until 1030.

Hooray Our Shtuff is Here!

In the meantime, the first order of business was to take down the offensive pink fruffy curtains in one of the boy’s bedrooms. The boys were having an absolute caniption fit that there were pink fruffy curtains in the room and they HAD to GO away RIGHT NOW.

Highly Little-Boy-Offensive Pink Fruffy Curtains

(No doubt left behind by some nefarious little girl with malice of forethought to any future little boys who might so happen to move into the house.) Maybe OCA's girls would like them?

As far as inventory control goes (see previous post), moving overseas is considerably easier than moving within CONUS. Moving in CONUS brings up all sorts of previous moving horror stories. Moving overseas, they put it all in big wood crates and nail it shut. The crates don’t get opened again until it’s delivered to you on the other end, so there is almost nothing missing from our inventory. I suspect the three items that were “missing” really are there and the numbers just fell off. (Several things came out of the crates with the inventory stickers missing).

Inventory Control

Assistant Inventory Control Officer

Through the course of the day, three of our new neighbors stopped by to introduce themselves and chat a while. So far they are all really nice, and our next door neighbor is even active duty Navy and takes the same commuter bus I am going to take to the Pentagon and Crystal City.

The neighbors told us that another little boy in 2^nd grade lives across the street and down two houses. ES was very excited to hear this. In fact, he took one of the beach chairs and set up camp at the far edge of our lawn facing toward the other little boy’s house waiting for him to come home from school.

ES waiting for the 2nd Grade boy

down the street to come home from school.

Normally shy ES surprised both my wife and I by asking my wife to walk with him over to the other little boy’s house to introduce himself after the other little boy got home from school.

Meanwhile, inside the house…

The COMFY CHAIR!

[Cue Sound Effect: Angelic Choir Singing Hallelujah Chorus]

After the movers were gone, we all went to Costco to grab a quick bite for dinner and to stock up on lots of basic stuff for the house.

Have I mentioned autumn is my favorite time of year?

[Cue Sound Effect: Angelic Choir Singing Hallelujah Chorus]

Sorry, is that blasphemous to suggest that angels would sing hallelujah about beer?

Walking through Costco was pretty crazy. By the time we got about a quarter of the way through the store, I had already run into two people I knew from the last time we lived here. I spent some time talking and catching up with each of them, so I was afraid we were going to be at Costco a for LONG time if we kept running into more people we knew. We managed to get out of there fairly quick after those first two encounters though.

Wednesday the second set of movers came with our shtuff that has been in storage since we left for Hawaii. Now we're in a sea of cardboard boxes and trying to get stuff put away.

The boys are being super helpful, too - building forts and leaving toys scattered across what little free floor space we have in between boxes.

YB playing "robot" in a box.

(This same box was previously part of a "tunnel" of three boxes across the family room floor and was later part of a "fort.")

On a previous post, I had a special request for a specific statistic, so here's the answer:

37 Number of attempted geocache finds during the big trip across country

33 Number of geocaches actually found during the big trip across country